It’s great to have our feet planted firmly in 2024, especially with all the ominous forecasts that came out of 2023, Would there be an economic contraction? Would there be a recession? What grave consequences would be felt from money printing in the early 2020s? What toll would worldwide political turmoil take on businesses? And just like being showered by a rainstorm instead of a hurricane, there was no full-blown economic crisis. Not for us. Not for 2024 at least. And although the economic prognosis is generally uncertain, it’s an improvement over past dire predictions.
Businesses have overall responded to this economic climate by treading lightly, with an eye on expansion. According to EY’s Global Economic Outlook: Finding Balance in 2024 businesses can thrive in 2024 by “accelerating investment in innovation”. The report asserts that “a super-cycle of technology-enabled innovation, particularly that driven by generative AI, calls for significant investment.” Leaders are called on to “secure capital used for building the enterprise of the future, keep up with advancements and integrate them into their business models.”
The reality is that to keep pace in 2024, businesses need to make conservative decisions while staying current with the latest technological advancements. This would mean keeping up with the top SPM solutions and leveraging this technology as a competitive business advantage. This brings us to the question of “what’s current today” and what solutions are being seen in SPM now, and in the coming years?
Staying current with the Sales Performance Management (SPM) landscape means embracing many changes. For example, cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), improved and easier data availability, and improved and easier SPM solutions for forecasting and territory management. All these technologies combined help businesses thrive, scale, and achieve operational excellence now more than ever before.
Cloud computing
Cloud computing has been integrated into SPM solutions in new ways with tech tools like Varicent Incentives (ICM), ELT (Extract, Load, Transform), and Sales Planning. This has brought about a change to common tools and how they’re used. For example, with such practical tools, teams can receive, share information, and seamlessly collaborate anywhere, any place. A benefit is that businesses run more smoothly, efficiently, and profitably. But what other advantages are there to leveraging this technology in businesses today?
Scalability, cost-efficiency, real-time updates, and data security make good arguments for making use of Varicent Incentives (Incentive Compensation Management), ELT, and Sales Planning tech tools. In addition, access to analytics and insights, flexible integration, reduced downtime, and adaptability to change all can’t be ignored—especially when the biggest competitors in the industry already have it in their toolkits.
It’s hard to grasp that some businesses still don’t fully mobilize current tech tools as they should, and collaboration still means sharing physical copies or emailing large files. For some leaders, this old-school way of doing business is especially hard to overcome, even if it means being uncompetitive in the modern business landscape.
Artificial Intelligence (AI)
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is a great planning tool to help sales teams better understand what customers really want, based on the data. Just like cloud services, AI is being integrated into SPM solutions in new and exciting ways. For example, Natural Language Processing (NLP) helps computers understand natural language, which in turn helps team members gain access to raw data with ease.
To illustrate, Varicent ELT users will have noticed an easy-to-use tech tool called “pipes”. This tool lets any team member transform a data source from its raw form into meaningful information to suit the business’s needs. And by “any team member”, this doesn’t mean any IT team member or the Comp Admin. This could be a salesperson, secretary, marketing manager, or other office worker.
User-friendly AI is the hottest and most persistent tech tool of the past several years, as it automates, simplifies, and greatly improves many processes that were previously terribly time-consuming, breathtakingly boring, and inexplicably inefficient.
For 2024, 2025, and 2026 there’ll be no SPM conference anywhere that doesn’t have well-attended speaker sessions on the topic of AI and how it can improve business. But rather than being a trend, AI is the current tech tool that can make or break businesses—or give businesses an advantage over others that aren’t harnessing the same technology.
Improved and easier data availability
Improved and easier data availability means trustworthy information is delivered exactly when a business needs it. Data democratization is one of the greatest improvements in data accessibility, and for users of SPM solutions like Varicent, tech tools like ELT are indispensable and game-changing.
As is also a current trend in AI, team members of all skill levels can now access information from SPM solutions through a democratization of data. No specialized technical knowledge is required, although it was a requirement in the past. This trend is repeatedly seen in SPM, and “user-friendly” is the new name of the game. Previously, the process was not user-friendly in the least and many users struggled with esoteric software.
When listing off advantages of improved and easier data availability, what comes to mind are enhanced decision-making, real-time performance insights, and increased collaboration—all of which improve productivity. In addition, quick strategy adjustments, improved forecast accuracy, and better accountability tracking all make businesses more agile and adaptable.
Improved and easier tools for forecasting and territory management
Improved and easier tools for forecasting and territory management enhance accuracy by analyzing past trends and data, helping inform sales decisions. SPM solutions like Varicent Sales Planning simplify the process and save time and effort. Through better forecasting, businesses are empowered to allocate resources more effectively, optimize sales strategies, and improve overall performance.
It’s no stretch of the imagination to say that before tech tools like these, businesses had Excel spreadsheets and other simple tools to poorly track forecasting and territory management. At this very moment, there’s no doubt that an Excel spreadsheet is being passed around between a sales team as they struggle to understand why the forecasting went so horribly wrong this past quarter—or why two salespeople were accidentally assigned to an overlapping sales region.
With SPM solutions in place like Varicent Sales Planning, businesses can systematically target specific sectors, regions, opportunities, and customers. This sure beats a paper map of all the territories marked up with a pen or punctuated by pushpins. These tools help sales teams set realistic targets, review their progress, and refine their strategy—so they can focus on what they do best: selling.
To sum up, there are Sales Performance Management (solutions that shouldn’t be overlooked like Varicent Incentives, ELT, and Sales Planning. These tools are game changers that harness in new ways cloud computing, Artificial Intelligence (AI), improved and easier data availability, and improved and easier tools for forecasting and territory management. What will distinguish a successful business from an unsuccessful one over the coming years, is the willingness to implement and adopt these new SPM tools to grow the business and become more profitable.
InnoVyne is a leading consultancy for Sales Performance Management (SPM) implementations. Schedule a free consultation to learn how your business can better succeed with the latest SPM solutions.
